Okay, everybody knows that the main plot of Twelve Monkeys is taken from a short film from the ’60s called “La Jetee,” which is awesome. But am I the only one to notice that the B plot (that is, the thing that actually ends up causing the apocalypse while everyone is distracted by Brad Pitt’s shenanigans) is lifted from the classic James Tiptree, Jr. story “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain”? The screenwriters wrote Blade Runner, so presumably they know their New Wave science fiction. Is this just me? Am I the only person who cares this much about Twelve Monkeys?
What?
…Oh, right, the X-File. Excellent work making mites scary. Mites are pretty scary in real life, too, but try using them for campfire stories. “And then the hippies who put their urban homestead chicken coop too close to their gray-water recycling tank got typhus and had to burn everything they owned. BOO!” That doesn’t scare anybody except here in Berkeley, where the old-timers swap mite stories around the old Biofuel Oasis.
Scully freaks out a lot in this episode. Still, mites.
This was the first complete episode of X-Files I ever saw! Probably explains why it’s still my favorite so far.
Save the forests from the EVIL logging indus…MITES!
MAN this episode scarred me as a kid. It was proper terrifying. Thanks for the memory!
Awesome summary, although I don’t remember this episode very well. It makes me want to go back and rewatch them all. Considering how much I loved the X-Files when I was 13, they are probably less awesome than I remember. Oh well.
But…I have been to the Biofuel Oasis! It wasn’t open at the time, but because I do communications about alternative fuels (including biodiesel) for the federal government, I took a photo. So that probably makes me even more of a hippie, or maybe just a hippie tourist.
This was one of the few season 1 eps that really showed the potential of the show. Too bad they wasted most of that potential.
Oh. And the morning after I watched this episode, I walked out into my garage, right into a spiderweb full of brand-new baby spiders about the size of MITES!!! I don’t think my scream carried more than a mile or two.
Even Mark Trail ends up hating camping.